Innovative tips and tricks to help you get flat abs, lose body fat, fight aging & live a healthier life. I'll even cover controversial topics that mainstream health "experts" don't understand about nutrition...the TRUTH about cholesterol & saturated fat, carbs, protein, and even superfoods you may have never heard of!

Thursday

Avoid these horribly unhealthy salad dressings!

I just put up this new article for you about which salad dressings you should avoid at all costs... plus, I give you my own recipe for a quick but super-healthy salad dressing:

PS - I've been looking for this for a LONG time, but I just recently found a whey protein that is made from GRASS-FED RAW MILK!! Oh yeah!

Most wheys are heat processed and are also from unhealthy grain-fed cows in horrendous conditions on factory farm feedlots. We've finally found whey protein with integrity -- and tons more health benefits, including more naturally-occuring CLA!

Tuesday

A new 5-Step Method for Six Pack Abs

I have a guest article today from my good friend Dr. Kareem Samhouri, an expert doctor of physical therapy, and he shows you a really unusual way to train the abs.

This is a totally different style of training as you can see below in the 5 step method...check it out:

The New Method For Six Pack Abs

by Dr. Kareem F. Samhouri, CSCS, HFS
Neuro Metabolic Fat Loss Expert

Slow abs training is now over.

It's time for a new era.

Training for six pack abs takes strategy. Understanding how to properly utilize your abs as stability muscles in all exercises will quickly improve your six pack abs training results. However, in order to be able to utilize your abs to their full capacity, you have to first know how to recruit them. This is where most people get lost... at least until now.

I've developed a sure-fire method for 'turning your abs on' with each and every exercise you do, beginning after the first 5 minutes of your exercise program. There's no way around it, and you simply cannot fail. I'm more than excited to share this method with you - are you ready to see major change in a very short period of time?

I'm going to teach you exactly what to do if you want to 'activate' your abs in every exercise you do, throughout every workout. If you think about it, this is going to make ab rockers feel like dinosaurs, and crunches seem as silly as those electrical stimulation devices you see on TV. You will literally be working your abs out for every rep of every exercise you do, and your midsection will be begging for a break when you're all done.

Your six pack abs results are about to improve exponentially.

Step 1 - Fatigue out your extremities completely.
Step 2 - 100 reps glutes
Step 3 - Fatigue out your extremities completely.
Step 4 - 100 reps abs
Step 5 - Rest 4-5 minutes and repeat, involving more of your trunk musculature with each exercise of each circuit.
Let's take a look at each one of these steps in greater detail, with an explanation for each, and why this works so well.

This goes against most modern teachings of 'proximal stability before distal mobility' and should be used with caution. The reason people usually teach you to work trunk muscles first is so that your little muscles (muscles in your arms and legs) won't give out and collapse on you when you're lifting a heavy weight. However, we're taking the neurological signal from our trunk, spreading it to our extremities, and then never bringing it back to our trunk.

In this step, what we're doing is depriving our arms and legs of oxygen, forcing blood out of our extremities, and producing lactic acid there quickly. Since our bodies will hold onto our blood and oxygen regardless, it's a strong bet that this oxygen is moving centrally, or towards our trunk. In a sense, we've now supersaturated our trunk muscles with blood, nutrients, and oxygen. We are primed for Step 2.

Step 2 - 100 reps Glutes

Example Glute Exercise:

Straight Leg Bridge On Ball

Lay on your back, placing your heels into the ball avoid stabilizing with your arms as much as possible. Emphasize squeezing your glutes to 'levitate your bottom off the ground' & go fast!

100 reps

Your glutes and lower abs are a pair. If you're like 99% of people out there, you have a difficult time recruiting your lower abs. By focusing on glute activation exercises second, once we have the oxygen present to endure more reps, we are actually targeting our lower abs, or "pre-activating" them for what's to come.

Step 3 - Fatigue out your extremities completely.

Example Set:

1. Side Step Squat With Med Ball Press - Start with your feet together, take a large step to the right, keeping your left foot on the ground, then squat and stand onto only your right leg while drawing your left knee towards your right shoulder. Simultaneously, press a medicine ball into the air. As you return the medicine ball towards your chest, shift your weight back into the wide squat position with your left leg on the ground and perform in reverse as you stand.

It's time to shift focus back to our arms and legs, but this time our abs are working to stabilize us, reduce risk of injury, and become a part of all exercises. We are now working our abs involuntarily, but driving more oxygen and blood to them at the same time through the aforementioned method above.

Step 4 - 100 reps abs

Ok, so it's time to test our ability, with no rest whatsoever, to really challenge our abs to hit the next level of strength and endurance. Because we have supersaturated them with oxygen, our aerobic abs fibers (about 80% of the abs fibers the average person has) are primed for the best performance of our lives. Now it's time to really challenge ourselves to do the impossible, and force ourselves to go above and beyond what we 'know' to be our limits. It's time for the new era for our abs.

Example Abs Superset:

Inversion Abs & Abs Wheel - Alternate each exercise to fatigue (perhaps 10 or so reps at a time), until you reach 100 total repetitions.

1. Inversion abs is to be done on a decline bench, with your feet towards the floor. Keeping your legs as straight as possible, while pulling through your abs, drive your legs into the air so that your spine is curved and you are slowly returning down towards the bench, one spinal segment at a time. As your low back approaches the bench, be sure to keep it as flat against the bench as possible to activate your transversus abdominus, or human waist belt.

2. Abs Wheel - similar to a push up position on knees, begin with abs wheel underneath the center of your chest. Now, maintaining tension between your shoulder-blades, slowly guide the abs wheel out in front of you, without dipping or bending your back. Maintain an abdominal tremble throughout. As you return the abs wheel to the starting position, be sure not to shift your weight posteriorly, as this will take away much of the effect.

100 reps, alternating between exercises each time you reach fatigue.

(That's just an example abs superset -- if you can't do those, you can choose your 2 favorite direct abs exercises from Truth About Abs or another routine)

Step 5 - Rest 4-5 minutes and repeat, involving more of your trunk musculature with each exercise of each circuit.

Adequate rest is necessary to derive as much from the following set. By involving more of our trunk muscles with each successive set, we are essentially teaching our bodies to always activate trunk muscles when using our extremities. This is a good habit to form to reduce risk of injury, and it also serves our greater purpose of teaching our bodies how to turn every exercise we do into an abs exercise at the same time.

Why spend your days exercising body part after body part, isolating one muscle group after the next?

Why spend so much time in the gym?

It's no longer necessary. It's time that you learn how to exercise as much of your body as possible, and to do it quickly.

I'm here to support you, if you're ready to take the next step. Join the thousands of people who already have - I've prepared a video presentation that will teach you all sorts of tricks just like this one and you can see it right here:

Saturday

Is raw food worth the hype?

I'm writing this newsletter while on a business trip in beautiful Vancouver, BC... what a great city! This is my first time in Vancouver and I've really loved this city and the friendly people so far.

I just returned from an amazing lunch with friends a few hours ago at a Raw Foods restaurant here called Organic Lives -- on Quebec Street. If you ever visit here, or live near here currently, definitely check this place out!

We sampled all kinds of different amazing dishes that were all completely raw. Some of them used hemp protein, brazil nut protein, or almonds as the source of protein.

For example, we had a raw lasagna that was made completely with vegetables instead of wheat pasta, and used some sort of brazil nut protein as the meat substitute. Although I love traditional lasagna as a good cheat meal, I have to admit that this raw food lasagna was pretty tasty.

We also had almond cakes, smoothies with fruits, coconut milk, and hemp protein, as well as about 10 other tasty items that we all shared and tasted.

We finished the meal with some fresh papaya (good source of digestive enzymes) as well as a shooter of some sort of blue-green algae shake, which was shockingly tasty.

Nothing at the restaurant used any refined sweeteners or any artificial ingredients. Everything was organic too. Also, I don't think anything contained any wheat either, at least for what we ordered (but I didn't confirm that with the owner).

But what's the real deal with the raw food hype that you hear about in certain circles?

Well, here's my take on it...

First, I've noticed that there seems to be a group of people out there that tend to be a little overly "extreme" raw foodists, where they preach that we shouldn't eat any cooked foods at all.

Now don't get me wrong...I think there are HUGE benefits to trying to make a large portion of your diet raw food. However, I think we have to acknowledge that eating cooked foods as a portion of your food intake can still be healthy, and even beneficial.

For example, certain nutrients in certain vegetables are actually more easily assimilated when those vegetables are cooked.

While some vitamins may be diminished or destroyed while cooking, some vitamins are actually made more available to the body. One example is the antioxidant lycopene, which is made much more highly available to the body in cooked tomatoes vs raw tomatoes.

That's why eating a portion of your vegetables raw has benefits, but also eating a portion of your vegetables cooked can also have benefits.

Plus, we also have to realize that the human digestive system has evolved over tens of thousands of years eating a portion of food as cooked...let's face it, our ancestors DID cook a portion of their food using fire or hot water.

So my big picture take on this subject is that while there are definitely great benefits to raw food and I believe should be included as a good portion of a healthy diet, I think they can be balanced with also eating cooked foods too.

I don't see any reason to be an "extremist" in terms of only eating raw foods and never even touching cooked foods.

Another aspect we haven't covered in the raw food topic is that in some cases, there can also be certain benefits to raw animal products, such as raw milk. I know that's controversial and I won't go into all of that today (more detailed article coming soon)...

One good example is the Samburu tribe in Africa that subsist almost solely on raw cows blood and raw milk and yogurt, while eating very little plant matter...yet they disply extreme health, strength, and lack of disease.

The big picture is that the human body can adapt and thrive to almost any type of diet (whether that diet is mostly plants or mostly animal food) as long as the diet is made up of natural unprocessed foods... on the other hand, processed foods are the one type of food that we cannot thrive on.

If you've missed any of these articles below, check out this page to see some incredible superfoods that can give you a better body:

So, to lose 10 pounds of pure fat, you need to create a 35,000 calorie deficit.

(please realize that 10 pounds of *fat loss* will probably equate to somewhere between 15 and 20 pounds of actual "wt loss" due to the simultaneous water loss that occurs any time you lose fat).

So, a 35,000 calorie deficit, huh? That's easy. In fact, if you didn't eat anything for 15 days, combined with exercise, you'd probably burn even more than that and finish up absolutely ripped after only 2 weeks of sacrifice, right?

WRONG.

Your body does *not* like long-term, drastic reductions in calorie intake and simply responds by 1) shutting down metabolism and 2) holding on to body fat, both as a starvation protection mechanism. Therefore, should you ever decide to try something akin to the above, you'd only end up wasting a heck of a lot of time and sacrifice for some pretty crappy results.

In fact, you'd probably end up looking "sick" and still fat. Probably *not* the look you're going for…

Simply put, creating massive calorie deficits (by not eating, or eating very little) does NOT work for optimal fat loss and physique transformation, and those looking for a quick fix all too often fall victim to trying something so silly in attempt to wake up next week with the body of their dreams.

Bottom line: your body is smarter than these elementary methods, and will very quickly put the breaks on your fat burning efforts in favor of protecting you from starving to death.

So does that mean that the "slow and steady" road is the only path to fat loss, or that rapid fat loss is a dead dream?

Nope! It just requires "smarter" methods that keep you one step ahead of your body, always in “good standing”, instead of repeatedly aggravating it by denying it the nutrients and energy it needs to function.

So how can we be smart about rapid fat loss?

Well, there are a number of ways (that when combined in the most strategic fashion can equate to some incredibly fast fat loss results), but one of the pieces of the puzzle is to create a massive calorie deficit that *actually works* because it's timed appropriately in conjunction with a time in which your body is very receptive to fat burning.

If you've read any of my past writings then you know that I'm a strong believer in utilizing Cheat Days to upregulate metabolism and important fat burning hormones, particularly leptin, while dieting. After all, it only takes one day of overfeeding or "cheating" to bring these hormones back to baseline and put the body back into an optimized fat burning state (while it takes about a week for them to substantially drop off again).

The end result is greater net fat loss week after week while still being able to enjoy your favorite foods on a regular basis. I'll take that deal.

Given that information, let me ask you a question:

When do you think might be the ideal time to introduce a massive calorie deficit to a diet cycle in order to burn the most fat?

I'll let you think about that for a minute…

Okay, got your answer?

Well, if you said after a Cheat Day, then you are 100% correct! Fact is, after a Cheat Day, your body is *massively* primed to burn fat. Leptin levels are at their peak, in addition to other important fat burning hormones, and your body is READY and WILLING to use fat for energy.

So, it's after a high calorie day that you'll want to create a massive calorie deficit via:

1. minimal calorie intake (i.e. strategic fasting)

2. massive energy expenditure through optimized exercise

Essentially, you're creating a huge calorie deficit (through both diet and exercise) on a day in which your body is extremely primed to burn those calories as fat AND when metabolism is at its highest point.

Make sense?

The truth is, through proper timing and proper strategy, you really CAN burn a pound of pure fat (and lose even more on the scale) in one day, without silly fat loss gimmicks or fads.

The secret, my friends, is all in the strategy.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The above fat loss trick is just one of the 9 advanced strategies that Joel uses in his new 25-day rapid fat loss program, The Xtreme Fat Loss Diet. Make sure to grab your copy now before Joel's special deal ends on Thursday:

While Joel's new system IS all about how to lose fat FAST (up to 25 pounds in 25 days fast), it ISN'T a "quick fix", magic-bullet solution.

Instead, it's a highly strategic system that incorporates some rather advanced strategies like cheat days, fast days, depletion days, and strategically timed exercise in the most ideal combination to yield the fastest possible result.

And believe it or not, he's even included one little-known, but extremely effective method on Day 5 of the program that will actually help you GAIN a couple pounds of firm, lean calorie-burning muscle as you rapidly lose fat. Pretty nuts.

Still, the truth remains: this is a somewhat "intense" system and as such will require your full dedication and effort over a short 25 day period--if you're not able to go 100% for 3 and a half weeks, this program simply isn't for you.

That said, if you're willing to put the work in and follow the program to the letter, you can expect to see some pretty remarkable progress in a relatively short period of time.

2. To celebrate the "Official Release" of the Xtreme Fat Loss Diet, Joel is running a $30-OFF pre-sale on the entire system until midnight on Thursday.

3. VERY IMPORTANT (TODAY ONLY) - While the $30 OFF debut sale will be available through Thursday, there is a super cool $397 Value FAST ACTION BONUS for Day 1 orders ONLY.

The Bonus - If you order today (and today only), you will be given access to a LIVE 120-minute Fat Loss All-Star Coaching session where Joel Marion, John Romaniello (Final Phase Fat Loss), and Dr. Kareem Samhouri (Double Edged Fat Loss) will ALL be on the line to answer your personal fat loss questions. This type of direct coaching from 3 industry experts all at once is not available anywhere else at any price, but if you pick up the Xtreme Fat Loss Diet TODAY, it's yours *FREE*.

Saturday

Free gift - Audio with great tips to get lean six pack abs

I've got a great gift for you today... it's an audio interview I did recently where an award-winning health blogger named Jackie pulls all sorts of tips out of me for getting lean six pack abs...

We discuss foods that help fat loss, workout tricks to get super lean, motivation, and TONS more... and as a gift for being one of my subscribers, you get complimentary access to the audio interview here: